And now, a break from my writing …

Not too long ago, I wrote a longish article about plastic bags. That’s all, just those ubiquitous plastic bags you see snagged on trees, lining gutters or washing downstream. But even that thumbnail sketch took several long posts and a considerable commitment of time to read. (If you think they took a long time to read, just consider how long they took to write! For every word in the final article, at least three were cut from the drafts.)

What does this have to do with gardening?

The way I see things is that we can garden our little faces off but if we don’t also tackle our relationship to our possessions, curb our mindless consumerism, and reconsider our personal values, we undo all the good that our little plot in the backyard might have done. And then some.

The very next time you go to the store and get distracted by the “ooh, shiny” … whether it’s an electronic gadget you absolutely must have or the latest in fashions that shows that you are ‘”au courant”, take a closer look, and imagine that object magnified by a factor of 70. That’s the waste load we needlessly place on the planet when we mindlessly purchase things.

Just look at it and ask yourself if owning it is worth the true price.

If it is, go ahead and buy it.

Just this month the front cover of Forbes called Monsanto “Seed Heroes”.

(hack, cough, cough) Balderdash.

I may buy a copy just so I can frame that cover as evidence that Forbes has abandoned even the pretext of journalistic integrity and cannot be trusted to be truthful in any matter whatsoever.

The linked video, about the effects of chemical farming in India, is instructive. I know that your time is valuable. I’m asking for 30 minutes of it with the promise that I will not waste even a single minute. Start by viewing the video for the first 26 minutes.

Then, with the other 4 minutes, read and meditate on Revelation 11:18 — especially that last clause.

“But the nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time for the dead to be judged, and to give [their] reward to your slaves the prophets and to the holy ones and to those fearing your name, the small and the great, and to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”

Look around you at the synthetic material in your home, your clothing, your containers, your car, your workplace, your places of worship and recreation and the vendors you do business with. And anyplace else that you can think of that I left off the list.

Most plastics NEVER biodegrade and putting them at curbside for pickup does NOT take care of the problem: the plastic is still on the planet … and so are you. Using them willingly makes us just as guilty of ruining the earth as their manufacturers, because we are the ones who provide the economic justification for their manufacture. No acceptance = no consumption = no sale = no manufacture.

As I write this, I move my plastic mouse around on a foam rubber mat and type on a plastic keyboard on my plastic laptop full of phenolic resin circuit boards and powered by a lithium battery. It’s sitting on a wood composition desk that contains, among other things, formaldehyde binding the termite puke together and some sort of vinyl, paper and ink fake wood grain surface treatment. Thank you, Sauder, for a desk that could have cost me thousands of dollars to have made in wood, but only a few hundred to slide out of a box and assemble on site.

Now, do you think you could do the same thing without the poisons?

I humbly acknowledge that the problem of getting plastic out of our lives and pesticide out of our foods is not a simple one; but somewhere along the line we’ve at least got to try. Pitching the existing plastic and using hemp grocery shopping bags is just a symbolic gesture, not the cure … the pitched bags have nowhere to go. But it is, at the very least, a start.

Do you remember when Madison Avenue was pitching us to change from paper grocery bags to plastic ones? We were told that the plastic was a lot cheaper to use and it was implied that this would favorably impact the cost of groceries. Well, the money difference is perhaps 3-5 cents per bag against the paper version which never seems to have shown up in MY grocery receipts, but the environmental difference is totally lopsided against the plastic. Paper versions decompose biologically … eventually becoming new trees. Or zucchini, or something else living. On the other hand, the plastic versions photo degrade until they are small enough to enter the food chain and then begin the march up that chain to your dinner plate. Even when they have degraded all the way down to the molecular level, that molecule is still an indigestible long chain polymer; some of which are mistaken by the endocrine system for the hormone estradiol.

Someone in Great Britain with too much time on their hands calculated that the average work life of the million or so plastic bags used in that country PER DAY was only about 7 minutes. Its lifetime after that is measured in millennia.

Plural.

I mention the plastic because we in America may be willing to accept birth defects in India as simply a sad fact of life … especially since it lowers the price of almonds for us. But are we willing to accept plastics in the edible portions of our own foods? The point being, we will not ‘get off the dime’ until we perceive a direct and significant threat to ourselves.

Monsanto makes the chemicals used in India. It also holds most of the GMO patents and sells roughly 70% of the world’s seeds. And it also makes a mountain of plastic each and every year. This DOES affect us and, unlike the people in India, we are actually in a position to take action against it.

– Bill

If you’ve read this far, you are probably also interested in at least a few of the additional videos at the bottom of the linked video page.

I just now Stumbled upon this posting from a fellow in Europe. Does anyone know what they do with the biomass left over after the methane digester is done with it?

http://conceptpop.com/80000-homes-powered-by-chicken-manure#comment-1387

How about in the US? Are there any large-scale methane digesters here? The American midwest has miles and miles of pig lots and cattle ranches as well as bazillions of chickens. All of these animals spend at least some of their lives crowded into relatively small lots. It should be technically possible / financially feasible to collect their waste and pass it through a digester on its way to a compost pile somewhere. Then it would, preferably, be used locally to enrich the soil that provided the feed for the animals or else bagged for use elsewhere.

Like on MY garden.

With the economic situation what it is, likely there are many first-time or returning gardeners searching the internet for tips this year. That is good. But there are many sites that are long on eye-candy and conjecture and short on facts.

1) Many sites will refer to compost as ‘fertilizer’. While most of my readers know better, new gardeners might get hood-winked. With an NPK macro-nutrient rating of 1-1-1, “fertilizer” is the worst of all possible reasons for using compost. Although the actual values will vary somewhat from batch to batch, compost will NOT ‘shock’ your plants into incredible growth spurts like the bagged and commercially-hyped stuff will. Moreover, some of these sites will try to sell you some compound or other for making ‘super compost’. Ain’t no such thing. Stuff rots. Compost happens. The formula for a healthy compost pile is simple … and free. Water and air along with a 50:50 mix (by volume) of nitrogen-bearing material such as kitchen or garden refuse and any manures you might have access to and carbon-bearing material such as dried tree leaves or straw. Add enough water to make the whole thing fairly moist, toss so as to mix things up pretty well and walk away.

2) Compost is an excellent source of minerals and trace nutrients. These are needed for the major nutrients (usually present in the soil and air in sufficient quantities) to work. The neat part about it is that all of these nutrients are available in a very complex and precise ratio with no effort on our part. The trees, grasses, manures, and other plants that went into the compost already did the mixing for us, having drawn from the ground precisely what they needed … and nothing more. As they decay, they release these micronutrients again and, voila! compost!

3) Many sites will tell you not to use (fill in the blank) type of manure in your compost. These sites are full of (fill in the blank). Don’t use any manures directly in your garden; that is, don’t just toss a shovel full of cat turds on top of the soil. DO include them in your compost.* DO work them into the soil if you can completely cover them to a depth of an inch or more. Nature has effective means to deal with pathogens or mankind would have become extinct a LONG time ago. The idea in organic gardening is to work alongside the mechanisms of nature synergistically. Figure out how nature is handling things and, when beneficial, ‘turn up the volume’.

4) DO make compost and DO add it to your soil. It will work wonders for it, no matter what type of soil you have. It will loosen clay soils, bind sandy soils and will cause your drainage to become right in both cases. If, by some chance, you are able to make more than you can work into your soil, apply it as a mulch in a layer at least two inches and preferably 4 inches (5 to 10 cm) thick.

5) DO read up on compost. Get a sense of how to do it right. Then get out in your backyard and make some. Then make some more. It may take several batches before you get it just right. But that day will come and you will never look back.

6) There are a lot of ways to make compost and only a couple of them call for an obvious above-ground pile. Possibly the above ground method is not the best one for your circumstance. For instance, nosy neighbors might object to what looks like a pile of garbage in your backyard, but they wouldn’t think twice if they saw you layering straw over the ground (especially if they didn’t see you spreading out garbage and manure beforehand). The neighbors and the police are unlikely to say a word if you dig post holes during the day (and fill them with kitchen scraps, straw, grass clippings and leaves at night). There are a lot of ways to skin this cat. Find the one that works best for you.

7) DO invest in a compost thermometer if you are going to use the above ground pile methods. A good one with a 20” stem and an analog dial is roughly $20 mail order. It will last for years and, among other things, tells you if the compost pile is getting hot enough and alert you to when to turn it by letting you know when it has begun to cool off. If you turn too often, the pile won’t reach its peak temperature of 160F but if you turn too seldom, the outside layers will lose their nitrogen before they get a chance to heat up, too.

DO plant more than you think you’ll be able to eat. The critters will take some, the neighbors will appreciate your largess. ALSO plan on preserving much of what you grow … it won’t be harvest time all year.

9) Many years ago the USDA determined that a quart of home-canned vegetables or fruit cost (are you ready?) just 10 cents from planting the seed to the table. Ten cents! Using organic methods, my wife and I normally grow food that we value at over $4,000 (compared to in-season grocery store prices) from only 240 sq. ft. in our backyard. We are out the price of the seed / plants, the water and some perspiration in the spring and fall. During the summer, a few minutes in the morning, coffee cup in hand, is enough to keep the weeds down.

10) Although, as I stated in item (1) above, compost will not shock your soil into record production, it does something else even more valuable. It builds up the soil, while the commercial preparations deplete it. When a soil is converted from chemical farming to organic farming, the first year sees yields drop sharply. The second year, there is some improvement. By the third year, the organic output matches the chemical output. That’s where most of the studies of the process, funded by the chemical companies, end. In the fourth year … and every year after that … the organic soils out-produce the chemical soils. I have a 10 ft trellis in each of my garden beds. I’ve picked tomatoes, ripe tomatoes, 11 feet up in the air. I live in Michigan, so that was no ‘long season’ stunt. We’ve got about 6 good months to grow vegetables and a couple of ‘iffy’ ones. I garden organically.

If you want to know the REAL ins and outs of composting, there are lots of books you can read and I’ll list a couple of them below. But if you are really curious about what happens in a compost pile, I can recommend no better volume than The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, Third Edition by Joe Jenkins. Don’t let the title put you off – the guy not only knows his stuff, he documents it and presents it in such a way that you’ll know your stuff, too, when you’ve finished reading it.

Be safe. Have fun. Eat well. – Bill

*Cat turds can pass parasites to humans. While this is a rare occurrence, if you have any doubts about how well a particular compost pile containing them did, allow it to sit for a year. The additional exposure to temperature extremes will work wonders.